The Necessity of Complexity

Complexity is necessary. In order to have mega systems and scientific breakthroughs, everything can’t be simple. We need to allow people to get from novice to master. The iPhone is often touted for it’s simplicity, but when you think about the engineering that went into the product when it lead the market with the technology, that was not simple. Complexity is everywhere, it is natural and beautiful.

Why We Fear the Complex

We fear complexity because of the cognitive overload and chaos. We prefer quick easy thinking, however slow thinking has been shown to be more accurate.

Dimensions of Complexity

There are three dimensions of complexity each with specific attributes.

• The Human Dimension – Skills, Education, Language, Culture
• Volume & Quantity – Data, Objects, Tasks, Rules
• Change over Time – User Skills, User Behavior, Product Focus, Product Features

Complex Applications

Things like Logistics, Remote Monitoring, Database Management, Accounting, Analytics, Finance, 3D Modeling, and Engineering are very complex.

Complexity Toolkit: Heuristics & Solutions

• Prioritize Tasks – Use things like weighting, rankings, segmentation and grouping.
• Patterns – Use patterns and consistency. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.  Research whats currently being done.
• Data Visualizations – Tell a story and make it beautiful. Interesting visualizations, graphs, charts, etc. Data is rich and full of insight, show that visually.
• Roles – Match the UI to the roles people play. People use software differently, don’t reveal complexities of roles that don’t matter to the current user.
• Learn  - Learn and adapt based on  the user. Personalized experiences.
• Reveal – Expose complexity when necessary. The cockpit of a jet should be complex.
• Zoom - Re-frame what the user is looking at. Org Chars, Maps, Document Views. What level of data exposure is needed, and how can they move in and out.
• Social – Social and emotive design can mitigate complexity and provide motivation. Competition, Leader Boards, Rankings, Sharing, Cooperation.
• No UI – The simplest UI is no UI, what can be done by the back end, or through another medium?

Recommended Reading

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Slides

In order to get from the problem to the solution multiple decisions need to be made. Those decisions are the how and the what and they create agreement and clarity.

There is unhealthy conflict, and healthy conflict. Healthy conflict is important in fostering creativity and encourages momentum while making decisions. Conflict is necessary to create a shared understanding.

The Conflict Resolution Model

The conflict resolution model Dan presents has three parts, each mutually impacting:

• Situation – A scenario involving conflict between two or more people. Ex. Purpose, Plan, Performance
• Patterns – Behaviors that enable people to resolve conflict. Ex. Empathize, Involve, Redirect, Reframe
• Traits – Aspects of your personality that describe your preferences and style of working. Ex. Style, Agenda, Circumstances, Knowledge

Situations/Traits

• How I perceive a situation.
• Whether I aggravate a situation.
• Whether I’m prone to create a situation.

Traits/Patterns

• Which patterns suit me best.
• How I apply patterns.

Patterns/Situations

• How patterns address situations.
• How situations benefit from patterns.

Using the Model

For each situation many patterns can be used to foster healthy conflict and create a shared understanding. To get better at understanding and applying the right patterns to situations Dan suggests his game Surviving Design Projects.

Slides

Customers Leave Because of Bad Service

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) study is a 3 year study that surveyed over 75,000 customers across multiple mediums and industries worldwide. They found that 89/100 of the customer service heads they surveyed said their primary strategy was to go above and beyond. Zappos is an example of a type of company that is known well for their customer service efforts. However the study also found that this extra effort made only a little difference to customer loyalty. 84% of customers surveyed said that their expectations weren’t met with their most recent company interaction.

The study found that while customers primarily stay for a product and partially due to the brand, the main driving factor for customers leaving is poor customer service.

The main reason customers become unsatisfied is because of effort. The more work the customer has to do to get their problem solved, the more likely they will leave. The most typical culprits of effort are repetition and channel switching. Repetition happens when people have to contact customer support over and over for the same issue. Channel switching takes place when the channel the user is trying to use doesn’t support the desired task. An example of this is reaching a department who can’t solve the problem.

Channel switching is a big problem, because departments may be logging calls like this as a success, as the customer is successfully redirected. However, this is really a failure, because the issue still hasn’t been solved, and it causes repetition. This is an example of a company metric versus a consumer metric.

“22% of repeat contacts come from downstream issues related to the original contact, even if the original contact “resolved” the problem.”

Focus on the Right Metrics

Current metrics are identifying the issues. The Customer Effort Score outperforms the Net Promoter Score in predicting behavior. The Customer Effort Score asks:

“How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”

This is measured on a scale of 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort).

Some additional metrics that can be focused on are the number of calls per event, or an audit of every time a customer is told “no” and why. These types of metrics will help identify the customer service problems that cause people to leave.

Summary

Focus your service teams on the unsatisfied customers and reduce their effort. Get rid of repetition and channel switching and zoom out your metrics.

Read Stop trying to delight your customers a full report provided by CEB and featured in the Harvard Business Review.

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Change is a feature and that feature needs to be communicated to create user success.

“Poor communication decreases success which impacts revenue”

An example of constant change can be seen with mobile applications. Apps are now often updated without even a users consent, or awareness. This makes communicating change that much more important. Not communicating change just because the change is better is the wrong way to think about it. Even things that are broken and then fixed need to be communicated because people have often become familiar with the issue and found a work around.

Communication needs to be human. Things like “Bug Fix A1TJS8″ are not good enough. Even bug fixes should have specific explanations.

How to Communicate Change

• Communicate in Advance – Do it early and often. Say what your going to do, and then do it. Provide sneak peaks into what’s coming.
• Communicate in Context – Tell people where they are, and when they need to know. Make it hard to miss, and easy to dismiss.
• Communicate in Perpetuity - Document for the long haul. Allow people to catch up if they haven’t updated in a while.

Advanced Communication 

• Cross Channel – Pick a couple of social and media news group channels.
• Choice – Let the user feel like they are choosing the change by giving the ability to revert even if temporary, or providing exclusive sneak peaks.
• Community – Make your users part of the process and they will communicate for you.

Slides

How do people organize paper based content?

People pile. As Thomas Malone put it there are piles and files. Malone made two major claims:

1. Desk organization reminds people of things to do, it isn’t just about finding things.
2. The cognitive difficulty of a categorically organized desk may be a reason why people organize them the way they do.

Piling

Piling leads to discovery and reminders. Finding is facilitated as the most important information is frequently on the top of piles. Reminding is done as older information is usually near the bottom of piles. Additional important documents typically have their own special place. Additionally, the stuff physically closer to you is usually more important.

“The physical layout of the desk maps to the mental model.”

Organization takes time and creates stress, especially when documents are miss-filed. Messier people tend to feel more in control as they are the ones creating the structure. Therefore we need to design for clutter.

Software for the Clutter

An example in software is the Apple Spotlight feature. It doesn’t matter where the file is located, you can hit apple+space and type the name and it will appear. Another example is the iPad Pages. The most recent documents are on top, similar to the way a desk might be organized. Safari also has Top Sites which reflect the top used sites which is generated by the browser and used by many in place of favorites.

Lazy organization is about being relaxed in the way users organize content and being flexible instead of imposing restrictions. Lazy organization is good, but it’s not the same as being clutter friendly. Being clutter friendly is about emergent natural structures that bend to the user. Adapting constraints to fit how the user wants to store information.

The method of organization should be attractive no matter what. Pinterest and Flickr are nice examples. They make the messes look good.

The software should be responsive not smug. Siri is an example of smug – an intelligent agent is never intelligent enough. Responsive means it just works, and it works for you based on how you use it.

Finally, the solution should be fault tolerant, not lazy. It should allow things like undo, or the freedom to explore and the ability to fix.

The Future

In the future there probably won’t be paperless offices because people think in piles. In order to design software that organizes based on the way people think you have to let your users make a mess. They are going to anyway, so you may as well help them enhance it.

Dynamic multifaceted search queries provide us with specific answers to dynamic questions that aren’t well defined. They augment our cognition.

Types of Data

There are 4 types of data that a person might need when trying to identify or find information:

• Categorical
• Your are in the category, or you aren’t.
• You can’t do math on categorical data.
• Examples: shirt color, hair color.
• Ordinal
• Items that have a natural order or hierarchy.
• You can’t do math on ordinal data.
• Examples: shirt sizes (S, M, L, XL), days of the week (S, M, T, W, T, F, S)
• Quantitative
• You can perform numeric calculations on quantitative data
• Examples: prices, dimensions.
• Spatial
• Forms of numeric data with spatial relationships
• Examples: maps, coordinates.

Representing Data

This data can be represented many different ways. For example when representing what and where, use categories and spatial data like positions in space, shapes, and groups. When representing how much, use positions on a scale, saturation, area or size, and volume.

Interface controls can also be used to represent data, for example:

• Choose 1 = Radio Buttons
• Choose many = Check Boxes
• Choose Range = Slider
• Create Own = Text Box
• Remove Points = Individual Deletes
• Sort = Drop Downs

Creating a Whole

What brings all the pieces and parts together to create a good experience is an interface that allows a broad overview, with the ability to zoom and filter and then see details on demand.

• Overview
• Zoom
• Filter
• Details

Adding things like history, extraction, and marking can then take the interface to the next level.

• History – Giving people the ability to make choices and refine them without starting over.
• Extract - Having the ability to save results, email, export, share and print.
• Mark – Allowing the user to highlight, denote favorites, make notes, and flag items of interest.

These interfaces should help people make decisions, by giving meaning to the data. This meaning will help them see the patterns they are looking for.

Slides

Metadata

Metadata enables:

• Consistency
• Context
• Interoperability

Metadata is information about information objects. There are three types of metadata:

• Descriptive
• Administrative
• Structural

Descriptive data allows you to discover and identify objects. Examples of this type of data are: date, color, version, make, origin etc. Descriptive metadata enables context. In UX it allows things like faceted search.

Administrative data is used to manage information objects. Examples are: status, owner, access, property rights, etc. It helps you get the right context, at the right time, using the right channel for the right user. In UX it allows a content strategy. Administrative metadata enables consistency.

Structural data is the composition of compound objects. For example your name is really a combination of 3 objects, first name, middle name, and last name. In UX things like good form design come out of structural data. Structural data enables interoperability.

Information Architecture of Metadata

Moving between multiple communication channels requires exchanging information. There are 3 sides to the IA triangle for information exchange:

• Presentation – How information is presented to the user.
• Storage – How that information is stored.
• Exchanges – How the systems exchange that information.

When you have two or more systems talking to each other using metadata standards enables those exchanges, which enables data linking.

Data Standards:

• Semantics – The meaning of data.
• Syntax - How the data can be expressed.
• Lexical Rules – Rules that qualify the data.

Experiences

A users is an information object, but experiences are not one size fits all. Experiences must be personalized. Each channel must know the user, the user isn’t the exchange mechanism. You should never have to ask the user for the same information twice.

Next Steps

1. Make metadata a priority. Link it to ROI through reduced inefficiencies, and create loyalty.
2. Define your data. Identify what object need to be defined by any object that: is part of, is delivered by, or is used by another object. Create your ontology using mental models, diary studies, and contextual inquiry etc. Discover what needs to be defined, then create the data standards.
3. Identify where exchanges are happening. Use tools such as journey maps.
4. Build the infrastructure. Start small, borrow and reuse.

Slides

She starts by saying that great social skills = great experiences. Men, are generally more comfortable negotiating than women, who have been shown to compare enjoying negotiating about as much as they enjoy going to the dentist. Additionally Americans generally have less experience with negotiating as compared to some other countries.

BATNA

The first thing to learn when it comes to negotiating is the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA. Your BATNA is your course of action should a negotiated agreement fail, otherwise put, it’s your alternative. You should never disclose your BATNA to the parties in the negotiation, and if possible make them start the negotiations. Your BATNA is not the same as a walk-away, but instead is a alternative that protects you while permitting exploration.

Example 1

Let’s say we have two people interviewing for the same job at a company with the same skills, Jay and Laura. Laura is would like to make 72k, but is winging it and has no BATNA. She accepts the first offer of 70k. Jay on the other hand has a BATNA in mind that says he’ll just stay at his current job for anything less than 75k. When offered 70k, he negotiates up to 77k.

Example 2

Susan’s AC broke in her mini-van, the one she just had repaired less than a year ago. She took it to the repair shop with a BATNA in mind that she would not pay for anything but the labor, because this is the second time the AC has broken. When the repair man quotes her $975 she asked how much labor was. After a little back and forth, she was able to get it fixed for $200.

Alternatives

Negotiating isn’t about winning or loosing, it’s about alternatives. You shouldn’t burn bridges when you negotiate, but don’t accept the first offer either. Try not to focus on one point, think about alternatives, what else can be negotiated? For example when negotiating for a job, if the salary can’t be changed, what about vacation time, or a signing bonus? If you don’t ask, you will end up with less.

Negotiating in UX

Things to negotiate:

• Scope
• Resources
• Methods
• Artifacts
• Solutions

Think about the person/people you are negotiating with. What is important to them: ROI, cost, schedule, etc. Research and know this before going into negotiations. What is their preferred strategy? Then separate the people from the problem. It is not about the people in the room, minimize any emotions and think about how the outcome will affect the users. Focus on shared interests: past experiences, benefit to the organization and user, savings, mutual gains etc. What can you do to work together within the constraints. Be sure to use objective criteria and standards in the negotiations: measurements, analytics, SUS scores, benchmarks etc.

Review

1. Identify and remember your BATNA.
2. Negotiation is only about Negotiations.
3. Find the best solutions for both.

Recommended Books

• Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher
• It’s our Research by Tomer Sharon

Slides

Crowdsourcing is how we go about…

• …outsourcing to a large group of people in an open call.
• …enabling convenient on demand access to a pool of human workers .

Slides

Live Demo

The presentation started with an exercise where we got to see Collaging in action. One of the members of the audience went on stage and chose photos that she felt reflected her experience with Facebook. While she was doing this Kyle talked to us about the technique.

It is important to have a large set of completely unrelated and undirected pictures. In the demo she was using pictures on sticker paper, but said she has had better luck with simple printouts and tape. You ask the participant, or participants to choose the pictures that speak to them about their experience. Tape the pictures they’ve chosen to a pieces of paper and write a small caption about why they chose each photo. When they are finished she recommends picking a photo and asking them to tell you about why they picked it instead of asking them to anser specific questions. This is because many of the questions that this method answers are not the types of questions that can be directly asked, they must instead be elicited.

Background and Usage

Collaging is considered a Projective Technique and has roots in psychology. Some of these roots are:

• Rorschach Test – People tell you want they see in an inkblot.
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) – The participant tells a story about the particular image of a scene being shown to them.
• Kinetic Family Drawing – Participant, often a child, is asked to draw a picture of their entire family doing something.
• Sentence Completion Tests –  Participants are asked to complete a sentence that starts with a lead like “I need…”, or “I like…”.
• Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) – Similar to collaging, it uses image to understand people thoughts and feeling around particular brands to help with marketing and brand placement. – Kyle recommends the movie The Greatest Movie Ever Sold as a great example of brand placement intentions.

Collaging is also used in many other fields, such as:

• Marketing – Used to understand feeling and responses to advertisements and brand associations.
• Management – Used to assess and evaluate employees motivations and drives.
• Sociology – Used to understand communities, and innovative adoptions.
• Cultural Anthropology – Used to study and assess cultural meaning.
• User Experience – To better understand the users perspective, and how to design for it.

Conclusion of the Live Demo

About this time the audience participant collaging on stage for the live demo was about finished so we got to see the photos she had chosen, and hear her talk about why she chose them. Here’s a summary of what she picked to illustrate her feelings about Facebook:

• A photo of what appears to be many different colored wires coming out of a machines. She described this as security and intertwining, and talked about how she manages her security on Facebook, only letting 75 of her friends actually see the majority of what she posts.
• A photo of two people in love. She said this reminded her of all of the engagement photos that seem to be inundating her news feed lately.
• A photo of two people holding hands. This reminded her of her travels and the connectedness of all of the people and places she has been.

Collaging Discussion

Kyle notes that Collaging does not fit every situation, and instead is simply another tool to add to the toolbox. It is most useful with sensitive data, and information that is hard to express.

“95% of our thoughts and feelings are unconscious” – Gerald Zaltman

How to Conduct a Collaging Study

• Choose a topic of interest
• Create a collage board and get pictures
• Be careful to ensure randomness and no theme
• 11×17 paper where they can post on the left, and write captions on the right of each image
• 150-200 images
• Sticky images can be used, but it makes it harder for people to change their minds
• Takes about 20 minutes
• leave the room, and give them at least 10 minutes without feeling the pressure of being observed.
• Conduct the Analysis
• Doesn’t matter the pictures they choose, so much as why they chose it.
• Be careful not to include images that are too salient, or people may pick them just because they are compelling images.
• If they can’t relate the pictures back to the theme being reviewed, simply omit those from the analysis.

Her article on Collaging can be found here at UX Smashing Magazine: Collaging: Getting Answers To The Questions You Don’t Know To Ask.

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